The present invention relates to a wireless communication processing technique for performing wireless communication processing operation between a plurality of apparatuses.
In wireless communication such as wireless LAN or Bluetooth, since connection between apparatuses unlike wired communication cannot be seen to the user, it is difficult for the user to detect an unauthorized connection by a cracker. For the purpose of preventing such an unauthorized connection, authentication based on passkey is used. In Bluetooth, for example, authentication called pairing is used so that, upon connection, an identical passkey is input from two communicating apparatuses to form a mutually relied relationship. An input/output means for the user to enter and confirm the display of the passkey is not provided in the wireless communication apparatuses from the viewpoint of preventing increase of cost and mounting area, but the passkey is previously set in another external device, so that, upon connection, authentication using the passkey can be automatically carried out under control of a program.
In the above technique, when authentication is automatically carried out under control of the program of the wireless communication apparatuses and even when a cracker tries many times to obtain the authentication from an unauthorized apparatus, the user cannot notice it in most cases. To avoid this, it is an effective measure, for example, to automatically refuse the connection from the same apparatus when the apparatus ends in failure of the authentication by a preset number of times or more. Even in this case, however, since a communication range is limited in a network based on wireless LAN or Bluetooth, it is still possible for a cracker or unauthorized apparatus to try unauthorized connection to an apparatus other than the connection-rejected apparatus in the same network. For this reason, the above is also considered not to be a sufficiently effective measure of preventing the unauthorized access.